....Illumination was mostly COL (circular oblique) and playing with the polarizers......

Very beautiful images, Michael!

Did you enhance the contrast a lot in post and darken the background?

My budget polarizers cannot not provide pure black background when fully crossed. My budget LOMO objectives can resolve very well in COL+pol, but my eyepiece view has never been so contrasty with such black background.

Thank you for sharing!

If you did not say those were taken with COL+pol, I would have guessed you used overhead highly oblique external light with very long exposure.

Last edited by zzffnn on Fri Feb 02, 2018 7:41 pm; edited 1 time in total

@zzffnn: Contrast adjustments and background cleanup / darkening are quite substantial on those shots. With an oiled DF condenser & planapos, there are so many depolarizing optical elements in the way that the background just darkens a bit when crossing them. It really helps adding detail to the small structures though. So yes, it does indeed look quite different through the eyepieces, but I try to figure what it can look like after editing, not what it actually looks like .